379: What’s India Building?: Tales from the Biggest Transition on Earth

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Transcript generated by AI. While we aim for accuracy, errors may still occur. Please refer to the episode’s audio for the definitive version

[00:00] Tom Rivett-Carnac

Hello, listeners, this week we're going to bring you the second in our three-part series on India, the remarkable transformations and the challenges that are happening in that country. But we couldn't begin the episode without making some comment about what's been happening in Nepal, the terrible loss of life and human suffering as a result of the landslides and the resultant floods that swept down those valleys. We've all seen the news articles, and we've all been horrified. The Himalayas are warming at roughly 50% faster than the global average. And that is leading to massive destabilization. As the permafrost thaws, these mountainsides become increasingly destabilized, and as we've seen, they can fall with little warning. Heartbreakingly, as the warming continues, this is the kind of impact that might accelerate, which only underlines the necessity of doing everything we can to reduce emissions, to restore nature. Thanks for joining us this week. We'll be talking more about this in a future episode. Do you think that there is a difference in driving an electric rickshaw to driving a regular rickshaw? Easier to drive, yeah.

[01:07] Unidentified (Rickshaw Driver)

It doesn't cost as much when it takes time to charge this thing.

[01:10] Unidentified (Rickshaw Driver)

But yeah, it's better than the troll or CNG.

[01:13] Tom Rivett-Carnac

Last week in Delhi, we ended with rickshaw drivers who'd gone electric because it provided a better livelihood for them and for their families. This week, we go back to India for the second of our three episodes. And that's the thread I want to follow up on. What's really driving India's transition? How does it show up in people's lives? And can the economic opportunities it presents really be experienced by all who need them? I'm Tom Rivett-Carnac, and this is Outrage and Optimism.

[01:47] Dia Mirza

Everyone wants to modernize, and the idea of development is informed by an economy that has shaped development the world over.

[01:59] Tom Rivett-Carnac

That's Dia Mirza. She and I talked at length as part of making these episodes.

[02:04] Dia Mirza

And so many of us are struggling to understand what is that model of development that we really want. Is it one that supports and protects ecology and therefore ensures and guarantees access to fresh water, health, a healthy climate, and a future that can sustain all of these people that live on this land and breathe its air and drink its water and, you know, grow its food? I think it's dichotomous, it's contradictory, it's messy.

[02:44] Tom Rivett-Carnac

India is in the midst of another major transition right now. Since 2000, the country's extreme poverty rate has plunged. It's gone from over 40% to just over 2% according to World Bank data. Now that is a stunning achievement and one that most people did not think India was going to be able to make. But with that pace of change, there are of course still major challenges. Many people in India now find themselves only just above that poverty line, and there are big regional imbalances across this huge country. Many talk of a missing middle class, with the country divided between a wealthy consumer class, fueled by booming sectors like tech and financial services, and a vulnerable majority who work in wage jobs or on the land. Now, of course, last week we were looking at people in the capital Delhi. But India is not mostly a country of cities. Mahatma Gandhi famously said that the soul of India lives in its villages, and despite the incredible changes of recent decades, that may well still be true. Despite being the fastest growing major economy on earth, 6% or 7% a year, two-thirds of India's citizens still live and work in rural areas. Compare that to China, roughly two-thirds urban, or Brazil, nearly 90%. Here's Shyla Raghav, former chief climate officer at Time.

[04:09] Shyla Raghav

What we know is that rural populations in particular are more vulnerable and sensitive to climate shocks just because their livelihoods are oftentimes interdependent with climate-sensitive sectors. And you can think about failed crops, water stress, extreme heat, debt, migration, and all of the health implications of these climate stressors that are more acutely affecting rural populations. And that's why climate resilience matters so much. For many families, climate change is already shaping, whether they can stay on their land, whether their children have a secure future. And because so much of India's economy is dependent and the social fabric is tied to land, to the water and seasonal stability, these shocks really travel quite far.

[04:54] Tom Rivett-Carnac

With all these drivers, the pull to the city can be really strong. Some people go permanently and others migrate seasonally to follow better paid work that fluxes throughout the year. A rural worker is likely to earn less than a city one for similar work. And the shocks Shyla describes fall on the same farm incomes most of the country still depends on. To avoid the hollowing out of rural communities, there is real work going on to reverse this shift.

[05:22] Shyla Raghav

One of the most inspiring movements that I've seen in India that's connected to Natural Solutions is this concept of reverse migration, which is a movement to keep people in their communities so that there's continued opportunity for economic development and growth and income generation that supports the entire economy in these regions. What migration tends to do is not only is there a drain of labour and of individuals, but it's oftentimes heads of households. And the entire social fabric falls apart. So what's been really interesting is this increased understanding that in order for people to continue their lives with dignity, oftentimes that means helping them stay where they are, where they feel the most fulfilled and where they're able to continue to maintain their livelihoods.

[06:11] Tom Rivett-Carnac

If people are going to stay though, there has to be something for them to stay for. And part of that is bringing the land itself back to life.

[06:19] Shyla Raghav

The other thing that I've seen a lot in India is movements towards watershed restoration. And in very arid regions like Rajasthan, there's work of really trying to restore riverbeds and restore rivers, where you see rivers that have entirely dried up are now coming back through ecological restoration, through stormwater retention. And these have had a material effect on improving the livelihoods in these rural populations.

[06:46] Tom Rivett-Carnac

There are now so many examples of nature being brought back by the efforts of people in rural areas and villages all across India.

[06:55] Unidentified (Rajasthan Villager)

The area used to be dry, drought-prone, and totally barren three decades back. Drinking water was not available.

[07:03] Tom Rivett-Carnac

In one part of Rajasthan, villages brought back a river that had been dry for nearly 60 years by building hundreds of small dams, enabling it to catch more of the monsoon. In Andhra Pradesh, a state programme has moved more than a million farmers off chemical-heavy methods onto natural farming, working with the soil.

[07:22] Unidentified (Andhra Pradesh Farmer)

In 2014, Andhra started off on an ambitious mission. No chemical fertilisers or pesticides.

[07:28] Tom Rivett-Carnac

It's thought to be the largest scheme of its kind anywhere in the world. And restoring the land isn't only a local good. It's part of how the country plans to hold its emissions down. The forests in India are a huge store of carbon. And the country is closing in on a big 2030 target for expanding them further. And it looks likely to hit that target. The idea underneath all of this is an old one.

[07:54] Dia Mirza

Mahatma Gandhi saw it. He called it. He said it. You know, his call for Swadeshi. What was it? Support local, grow local, thrive locally, you know. That is what is really going to build a world that is equal and fair for everyone. And more than anything else, a world that is safe and inhabitable and healthy for everyone.

[08:23] Tom Rivett-Carnac

Many of these solutions can be incredibly inventive. When I asked Shyla for an example, she reaches for an engineer high in the far north of the country, and one idea among many.

[08:35] Shyla Raghav

Sonam Wangchuk, he really has broadened our idea of what climate leadership and education looks like. He's an engineer, an educator, an innovator from Ladakh, which is a northern region in a mountainous part of India. And he has really championed and brought back this traditional practice of glacier grafting into modern ice stupas in mountain communities to manage water scarcity and glacier retreat. And his stupas have produced 264,000 gallons of water at a time when water scarcity and accelerated glacier melt is threatening water security in these regions.

[09:17] Tom Rivett-Carnac

I think one of the things this illustrates is that these traditional practices in India can really help solve modern problems and they're uniquely Indian solutions. So what's the answer to the question that Dia posed earlier?

[09:31] Dia Mirza

What is that model of development that we really want?

[09:34] Tom Rivett-Carnac

The question of the model of development cannot be divorced from the concept of justice. India is a country that has now been free for 80 years from colonial rule. That colonial rule that was imposed by my country, Britain, took place over 200 years. During those two centuries, enormous amounts of wealth and value were extracted from the country, along with inflicting enormous amounts of human suffering. Before the British arrived, India was probably the greatest economic power in the world. When the British left, so much of that opportunity and possibility had been stripped away. I reiterate this here because traveling around India, it became evident to me that so much of this history still shapes the world that we live with today. And we in the West don't think about this enough. This legacy is a fundamental part of understanding the world as it is today. This needs to be taken account of when we look at development and we look at the world that we want to create, if we are going to move towards a safe, regenerative future. We're just arriving at the Ghazipur landfill, which is the very famous open landfill where so much of the city's municipal waste goes. And it's picked through by human beings to recover astonishingly 56% of all the recyclable materials that aren't sorted in the city. All the material comes here and the waste pickers go through and take a lot out and they scratch themselves a living. Most of India's municipal waste is still sorted by hand, by a workforce running into the millions. I wrestled with whether to visit a landfill while in Delhi. I didn't want this series to tell the same story we've seen on the news of all the challenges and all the problems, but I also wanted to ensure that we told the real story of humans on the ground and what is actually happening in the midst of this transition.

[11:30] Adnan Bhat

Okay, so everywhere in this neighborhood, somebody in the family has some issue when the elders can't come out of the house once summer hits, it's so bad.

[11:40] Tom Rivett-Carnac

While in Delhi, we worked with a local journalist and filmmaker, Adnan Bhat. You've met him already and you'll hear him throughout this series. He really felt it was important that we visited. Ghazipur is one of three municipal waste sites that ring Delhi and has taken much of the city's waste since 1984, around two and a half thousand tons of it a day, with 150,000 people living in its shadow. Adnan, you're a journalist and a filmmaker, we've been working with you since we've been here. As part of this time, we've been telling a story about air pollution, telling a story about climate, and you've been very keen that we come here to the Ghazipur landfill. Why were you so keen that we come and see this?

[12:19] Adnan Bhat

Two reasons. One, because I wanted you to see, meet people who live here, who face, of course, air pollution is a global problem. It's not a regional problem, or it's not a local problem. It's a global problem that we face. But there are pockets in Delhi where it's worse. When we talk about air pollution, we look at the heavy metals in the air, we look at how the impact it has had. So there are parts in the city where there's still green cover, there's still people who have access to air purifiers, who have certain luxuries which can still shield them from what is out here happening right now. So I wanted you to come here and meet these people who live on the fringes of this massive waste mountain and which sends out gases into the atmosphere and makes their lives hell. So that was one reason that I wanted you to meet these people. And the other reason is, again, this also tells a story of the inefficiency of the authorities who promise every year that they're going to make it better. And this is the image that perhaps can tell it better than anybody else, that this is here in the middle of the capital city and it's been here for decades and yet nothing can be done about it.

[13:36] Tom Rivett-Carnac

Adnan's right that the mountain has outlasted a lot of official promises to remove it. A contractor is promising to clear the whole site by 2028, about a third of it is gone already but it has been incredibly slow and the deadlines have not been consistently met. The waste still arrives faster than anyone can shift it and few people here believe that it will ever truly disappear. While there we meet the woman who heads the local residents association. She's a political activist and a mother, part of the mostly Muslim community that has grown up in the shadow of the waste pile. Many of them are migrants from poorer states in India or from neighbouring Bangladesh. She's lived here 50 years, since before it was a waste pile at all. She speaks in Hindi and Adnan translates.

[14:29] Adnan Bhat

She's basically saying that, you know, like, when you go out, please tell our story to the world because, you know, like people do not care about us. Nobody here in the city cares about them. No politician cares about us. Like, we have been facing this for many, many years. So once you go to your country, back to the world, please do not forget about this story that this is happening to us. And like our politicians go around the world, they tell around the world that India is a great place to live and be and do business. But look at us, we've been fighting for 50 years and nothing has changed. Just tell the world what is the reality of being here in Delhi. Unless you're not rich, this is where you have to live.

[15:10] Tom Rivett-Carnac

Across town, my thoughts begin to move, not to what we've done in the past, but what India has to build next. India is growing. The population is projected to peak around 1.7 billion people sometime in the 2060s. That's 200 million more people in little more than a generation. To this end, the country is in the middle of the largest government funded housing program in history. Almost 50 million homes in rural areas alone are to be constructed. And that's just a fraction of what's coming. On some projections, about 73% of the building stock India expects to have in 2050 has not yet been built. One person working on this is Mahendra Singh. We meet him at a summit India has hosted for 25 years, the World Sustainable Development Summit. It's a world away from the place we've just left across town. Mahendra is the Managing Director of one of India's largest cement groups, Dalmia Bharat. Cement is responsible for something like 7% of the world's CO2. Making it releases carbon twice, once from the fuel that heats the kiln and again from the chemistry that turns limestone into clinker. Getting the transition to low carbon cement is going to be really important for India's overall transition, since the country is the second largest cement emitter globally. Even though the total emissions are still low on a per capita basis.

[16:38] Mahendra Singhi

Our Prime Minister declared its intension that in COP26 in Glasgow, first he declared that we will be having 350 gigawatt of renewable power, when we had only 20-30 gigawatt.

[16:53] Tom Rivett-Carnac

That was huge.

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